D.L. Byron: This Day and Age (1980)

(Arista)

Today, we think of the premier power pop band as Big Star. Why is it, then, that so many self-proclaimed aficionados of the genre claim no love whatever for Alex Chilton and company? Probably because in practice, at its peak, power pop reflected something altogether more macho than the eccentric self-doubt and torment Big Star personified. If anything, the meatiest power pop of the late '70s and early '80s, much of it commercially unsuccessful, shies away from ambiguity. The Cars had some level of weirdness, some shades of gray, but someone like the Knack or D.L. Byron exemplifies as clean cut and bright a sound as a Billy Joel record. Byron, in fact, uses some members of Billy Joel's backing band on this, his sole full-length album for Arista.

On the best, most tortured cut, Byron sings "I can see the whole world turning on me, and it's offering me no guarantee for tomorrow," but it's rare that he strays far from his throaty, vague proclamations backed by generically fashioned basic guitar pop. His voice is a grating blend of early Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson; the only time it comes off trustworthy is at its most irksomely misogynistic: "Backstage girl, I put you to the test / 'Cause you're not like all the rest who go upstairs and get undressed."

No one at the label could push this enough to sell more than a few copies, all of which undoubtedly went to cultists who still treasure the record today. But as with so much post-Badfinger power pop, its colorless, workmanlike nature becomes its own identity, recommended for those addicted to well-crafted hooks and not a whole lot else.

James Blake: CMYK EP (2010)

(R&S)

A bit of plastic soul texture run amok, this very short extended player from Brit electropopper Blake won't hit you with four-on-the-floor but does intrigue in its tricky, skittering rhythms matched with teasing vocal snippets. His delicate futurism doesn't hit to an emotional core quite yet, but it's inches away from breaking your heart. Right now it's ideal for deep thinking, reading, making out, whatever.

Oddly enough, fifteen minutes actually feels like enough, maybe even too much, because these four tracks are variations on a single theme that wears itself out. It could be one long, gradually shapeshifting track. As it is, this pure mood feels like the beginning of something cool, but just the beginning.

***

[Editorial Note: We will return to archival releases on Wednesday. I'll be back with a mega-post embodying my 2010 top ten list next week.]

Devo: Something for Everybody (2010)

(Warner Bros.)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Want to know what smug, cynical nerds with a penchant for didactic social satire sound like when they reach middle age? Like Fatboy Slim and Al Yankovic producing a Rush album, basically. In other words, no you don't. Jesus bloody Christ, twenty more years of silence, please.

Robyn: Body Talk (2010)

(Konichiwa)

[2019 note: Revisited this for my end-of-decade project, and what can I say? I got it wrong -- though none of its other tracks are absolute masterworks on the scale of "Dancing on My Own," the finished album is essentially one blissful banger after another, and it would be absurd not to list it as HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, but I've allowed my original review and its attendant consternation to stand as originally posted below. Incidentally, I also now disagree that "Show Me Love" is a banal song; these days I feel it's glorious.]

RECOMMENDED

I was in junior high school when Robyn's first career as teen poptress was at its peak. The bid for the American market was the populist banality "Show Me Love," accompanied by a stylish Gap commercial-style music video. Flash forward thirteen years to find Robyn sharing an audience with Animal Collective and fellow Swedes the Knife and, well, it makes you wonder. Happily, the Robyn story is how the biz ought to work -- dissatisfied with the artistic control she was given by her label, she found her own methods of distribution and generated success on her own terms with slamming, often bawdy electro-pop. Rediscovery in America hasn't been an easy fit (her U.S. label didn't want her face on the package of her 2007 eponymous record, lest terrified listeners learn that they were listening not to the passions and yearnings of a nubile teenaged girl but to, gasp, a woman), but unexpected encouragement from college radio and the music press has helped a lot. She deserves the praise because she reminds the world that the distinction between an artist and a mere star doesn't begin and end with the genre of music he or she emits.

Body Talk is the second full-length LP of the semi-reinvented Robyn. It's an album of immaculately crafted dance-pop, the result of a year of hard work: in 2010 Robyn released three extended plays of all-new material, the first two issued separately and the last represented by this complete album accompanied by highlights and remixes of Body Talk Pt. 1 and 2 material. The EP format felt too scattershot for this music -- the album allows for more variance and more time to settle in with Robyn's quirks, both by making them more indulged and more obvious. Familiarity with Robyn's offbeat tastes is an advantage, because without the ear for detail one could mistake much of her material for something far less interesting than it is. Of course, top 40 listeners underestimate the pop smarts of our non-major label players, and indie rockers vastly underestimate the intelligence of top 40 pop. So what is different about Robyn that gives her full reign of the hipster-approved wing of radio dance-pop?

Humanity and quirk are the key. Robyn is a fine vocalist and better writer (she composed or co-wrote most of the tracks here); she is fond of self-consciously eccentric conceits -- the sex-toy fembots of "Fembot"; the DeLorean of "Time Machine" (a lovely nerd anthem); the ridiculous Snoop Dogg cameo on "U Should Know Better"; and the odd, acidic house loopery of "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do" and "We Dance to the Beat" (...of the clicking teeth of bad kissers, in case you're wondering), but these almost seem like an afterthought or a protective veneer. Her soaring moments come from empathy, as on the touching love note "Indestructible" and the banging tearjerker "Call Your Girlfriend," that is both more eloquent and more honest than what any of Robyn's peers could likely accomplish, particularly with such consistency. Robyn's finest song to date, the massively heartbroken "Dancing on My Own," is the best track of its kind since Madonna's peak, specifically because its dumped, dragged, and bewildered story has been told since eons before "Lipstick on Your Collar" even... but has seldom felt so lived-in.

All that really holds Robyn back from greatness on the LP is its length -- a happy compromise between EP and album this isn't; it runs 61 minutes -- and her obsession with two specific kinds of songs: the alien, bleak, techno-derived minimalistic jam and the triumphant circa-1987 dancefloor anthems that aim for higher and higher still arm-waving. The exceptions either sound better here than they ever would out of context ("U Should Know Better" springs to mind) or worse (the shuffling, sensual fake reggae of "Dancehall Queen" charms on its own, brings forth too many Ace of Base nightmares on the LP). Robyn should never apologize for making the music she wants to make, especially since she scores at it so consistently, but listening to Body Talk, really an instant greatest-hits, is like sitting down with all of the Cars' singles at once. After a little while, you need a break, the same way you would during a day spent at an amusement park. The hooks are nonstop, the pop candy relentless. Twelve songs and forty minutes of this, you'd be aching for more. Fifteen songs and an hour, well, that's quite enough, thank you.

Better yet, with her gift of gorgeously expressed aching and loss, she could throw the whole gang for a loop with a few shatteringly pretty slow ones. They can have a beat and shit still, sure, but if anyone can break us out of the mold of ballads being inevitable clunkers in the disco field, I think it might be Robyn. We might find out next year when this insanely prolific, tirelessly inventive lady apparently plans to issue her next project.

Gonjasufi: A Sufi and a Killer (2010)

(Warp)

Coming from the same branch of abrasive grab bag jazz-electronica as Flying Lotus, this seems to warrant prediction as an automatic dismissal for me; I've gone on record here decrying my resistance to this evolution of techno, a genre once very dear to me. If anything, A Sufi and a Killer drives the point home; sampling various tracks, I came away bitterly annoyed and shellshocked. Taken as a whole, the album undeniably reveals ample talent, but it's so much to take in -- so confusing, so otherworldly and overwhelming -- that only those with a major investment in the new will probably warm to it.

The rest of us will frequently be tempted to turn the racket off; Sumach Ecks bellows and snarls over tracks that vary from dreamy transcendence to repetitive cacophony, leaning heavily on the latter. The heavy use of limiting and compression, as well as the kitchen-sink sonics, seem designed to drive the unimaginative wimps out of the room. Even the wimps, though, will grudgingly admit that there's more to this than confrontation. Ecks uses texture and freeform structure masterfully, and if nothing else, this is marvelously expressive music. If it sends you out of the room, it at least deserves your respect. And maybe we'll all come around eventually. It's more likely that Gonjasufi is ahead of us than that he's simply aloof.

Some of the guttural screaming and stabbing synth hitting is still a bit much for me. But that's my own problem, and it's my job now to learn how to catch up.

Julian Lynch: Mare (2010)

(Olde English Spelling Bee)

RECOMMENDED

I missed this bloke when he played an in-store at Gravity Records here in town, and I'm really regretting it. Mare is a damned interesting album, sharing with Flying Lotus a mutual interest in jazz and electronica, but offsetting this with a lovely ambient vibe and capturing it all in a singer-songwriter framework. The songs kind of shimmer briefly before they wander off into the background of Lynch's breathtaking walls of noise, but that's what makes this discreet music wrap around and enrapture the audience that's hopefully hearing it vaguely in the background of life, preferably in another room even.

Hailing from New Jersey, subject of the finale here, Lynch is typically billed as part of the increasingly omnipresent chillwave and bedroom pop scenes, but his voice is unique and involving. Of all the electronic-tinged performers currently making waves with their dedication to analogue artistry, Lynch's formula seems most fascinating and -- gulp -- commercial. None of the songs on Mare fail to captivate, but they demand to be heard together, and they come off best when they are positioned to surprise from an aural distance -- background music with bite. That's a particularly Eno-like notion, and that's fine company for a young singer-songwriter to be in.

ceo: White Magic (2010)

(Sincerely Yours)

RECOMMENDED

Catapulting from a brief thematic reprise of "Brazil" and periodically dipping back into its well, this is an album in the old, symphonic sense that Pet Sounds once suggested, in the context of more-than-serviceable dance music by mysterious Swedish entity and Tough Alliance offshot ceo. ceo is Eric Berglund, who actually is the CEO of this record label, but this is one side project and label vanity curio for which you'll be thankful. White Magic is a beautiful, inviting record that amply rewards the attention it briefly requires.

Shorter than most EPs I reviewed this year at a mere twenty-eight minutes, the record nevertheless feels expansive, an Eno-esque aural landscape of sorts. Technophiles alienated by the fragmented blipping of modern electronica will find a home in these earnest and absorbing sonics, sounds, and songs. The opening track "All Around" barely qualifies as pop music, bending more devotedly toward ambient or classical -- slow and heartrending with a shattering cello and a full arrangement that rivets, envelops.

On the whole, though, this is not ambient. It's doggedly pretty dance music with admirable brevity. About half the songs borrow club-oriented conceits, but all with a twist. "No Mercy" and "White Magic" nod to starry-night psychedelic hip hop and Afro-polythmic explosions respectively, while the more conventional new wave of "Love and Do What You Will" is decidedly enhanced by its modern pop theatrics, hooks out of the Ke$ha or Gaga rulebook with an extra-eccentric guard. Best of all is "Illuminata," which aims at the perfect brand of dancefloor catharsis -- creative, bright, nostalgic, and sad, it could almost pass for the Apples in Stereo with a bit more nasal emphasis -- and like any great catharsis, it's over quickly.

The other half shares its fascinating symphonic and folk conceits with "All Around." ceo suggests a fandom of both Andrew Bird and Holland/Dozier/Holland on "Oh God Oh Dear," while "Den Blomstertid nu Kommer" tones down the vivid synth quacking for a naked bit of sentimental folk. It's on "Come with Me" that we seem to get a glimpse of Berglund's soul, which he typically keeps well-protected. This song -- backed with the return of that "Brazil" fragment -- finds him most affected, most willing to surrender, and just because he has to make it a little difficult, it's all built from a weird "keep it real" sample.

Berglund's almost obsessively nonchalant vocals are the ceo project's only undoing. They unwind this often great record into something merely agreeable. It's hard to say if it's just his tone, which is somewhere between Mike Love and Elvis Costello, or his evidently practiced distance, but the strained ambivalence doesn't work for this music. There are shades of something brilliant here; hopefully ceo isn't just a one-off, as has been rumored, and we'll get to hear this develop.